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An Overview of Bing Search Updates

Are you a loyal Bing browser user? Microsoft made some changes to make their search engine smarter. They also invested in some new features and an interesting new partnership.

Here’s everything you need to know about the Bing search updates for 2018.

Why Did Microsoft Make These Changes?

The update was in part to help consumers trust in the information provided as a result of a web search. With the proliferation of “fake news” and concern on the part of the consumer as to finding trustable news sources, Microsoft wanted to help.

Microsoft’s corporate vice president for AI products, Jordi Ribas, had this to say about it, “As a search engine, we have a responsibility to provide answers that are comprehensive and objective.”

Designed to help fight the “fake news” trend by providing verified, search results feature side-by-side opposing views. Instead of providing search results with a list of popular sites, the results will instead provide a list of opposing viewpoint articles and links.

Many results come from sites like Answer.com, and counterpoints from editorial websites. Microsoft hopes that providing these responses from these sources will help to limit the amount of “fake” news that comes up as a result of a search request.

Conversational Queries

Similar to other search engines, Bing will now allow for conversational queries. Instead of typing a phrase, like “Winter Olympics”, users can type a question like, “How many gold medals has the U.S. won at the Winter Olympics?”

The results will also be provided in an easy-to-read card format. For these, more objective type questions, results will also have photos, videos, and other related sites.

Reddit Partnership

As part of the Bing search updates, Microsoft has partnered with Reddit to return some of the query updates results. More specifically, if you ask a question that’s been answered in a Reddit AMA (“ask me anything”) thread, those results will now feature prominently.

The Reddit partnership has three different facets. First, when a user types the name of a subreddit into Bing, a live snapshot of the top threads in that subreddit will appear along with live links to each thread.

Second, the Reddit AMA function, so if someone were to search for a celebrity name, if they had done an AMA, that would appear in the results card.

Third, as mentioned above, AMA answers from threads will appear as part of query update results.

My Saves Section

One of the Bing search updates is the creation of the “My Saves” section. Users can now create collections of their search results, whether it be videos or photos, and access them later.

Clicking on the plus sign will add the item to your collection, which can be further customized later for easier image retrieval.

Because video content is gaining popularity as a digital marketing trend in 2018, this feature will help you to organize the mass of videos out there.

Expanded Entertainment Carousel

Bing has had a carousel for entertainment-related searches. As part of the new Bing search updates, the carousel has expanded.

In addition to retrieving regular web content, Bing will also now include what’s trending on both Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Bing Search Updates — Richer Results

Most critics agree that the latest Bing updates will provide richer results and an interesting test of new AI search engine capability.

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